In addition to Amy visiting this weekend, my parents’ dog, Todd has also been dropped off. He’s staying until Sunday when I have to take him back home. Amy’s dog Twinkle is also staying, so the house is full of inquisitive noses and wagging tails. You lie down for two mintues and a soft, cold squidgy nose comes to investigate.

Earlier we took them out for a walk around the midge-infested septic pool across the road. It’s a fairly nice walk through a forest if you mind the dog poo and local chavs.

Amy’s come over for the weekend and since it’s nice we decided to have a barbequeue. I bought a double-pack disposable barbequeue pack from the local petrol station, the sale of BBQ equipment at petrol stations being a typically British thing. They weren’t the best things, taking a few sloshes of meths to get the coals going properly, the bit of soggy cardboard lighter paper having no real effect.

Once the chicken was on it soon started going

I don’t think I’ve done anything interesting today. I watched a lot of telly and that’s about it.

I am currently listening to CB radio over it using the really cool WebSDR. I am listening to two people in Norwich talking to each other, and someone from Hanover. However I have no receiver, but am using the Internet and a receiver in Holland. Cleverly my computer is running a software radio receiver and doing all the frequency tuning and decoding. The system is really cool.

It’s like IRC, but the chatter mostly seems to consist of people talking about their kit, where they’re from and announcing their callsigns.

I want to buy a radio scanner now and hear what the locals are saying.

It’s pretty foggy out there. I’ve just been ‘over the border’ (between Yorkshire and Lancashire) along the M62 to visit Steve to sort out some things we’re doing. The weather wasn’t so bad when I left, just the usual drizzle and rain, but over the tops it’s a near whiteout. Coming back in the dark was a slow and difficult affair, playing the game of ’spot the red lights’ and avoiding the trucks.

Steve’s local pub has wifi, and also a rather poorly chosen password on the router. We did the slightly poncy thing of installing Visual Studio on my Macbook in VirtualBox while eating our tea.

That is the reason for this weekend’s mad 600-mile round trip, stopping off at four people’s houses on the way to break up the trip and make it a bit more interesting. It’s a 42 inch Toshiba rear-projection telly.

Getting it into my car was a mission and a half. We spent the journey home with the front seats slid forwards, and the back seats flattened. The telly just fitted in my car but did very horrible things to the fuel economy. Getting it out required help from my neighbour, but me and Amy managed to lift it onto its stand by ourselves. It’s a big bugger, coming almost up to my shoulders.

I got it free for one reason; it has convergence problems and will randomly decide that the red, green and blue images shouldn’t match up.

Rear projection tellies are strange beasts. There’s three CRTs in the bottom part of the TV, they project their image upwards and through a complex system of lenses and mirrors the three images are converged on the back of the screen. The screen is a giant piece of plastic that has been tinted. If something happens to the convergence ICs, or some part of the optics, the image starts to look like one of those anaglyptic 3D images with mis-aligned red and green images.

However, when working, the picture is pretty good It’s big and doesn’t have any weird artefacts like LCD displays show. I have tested it out with some TV, a bit of Crackdown and Space Giraffe.

I’m strategically ignoring the convergence problem until it becomes permanent or starts to irritate me. The Internet is full of people saying their rear projection tellies, and the fix seems to be to gut the telly and replace the driver ICs with new ones. Apart from the lethal death voltages the replacement is a simple soldering job.

I shall have to closely watch the telly for a few hours and make sure it works properly I don’t think I can go back to a “small” TV any more though. Maybe two player Halo and Mario Kart will be better on such a large screen too

In contrast to yesterday’s warmth, the weather has been ‘traditional’ and quite quite damp, windy and generally a bit nasty. This is more like the Wales I know Me and Amy braved the murk and went into Carmarthen for some greasy takeaway goodness earlier, and are now off down to the pub with Jeff & Giles.

Playing GTA4 on Jeff’s giant telly was an amusing and eye-bleeding experience. All those photons.

Me and Amy are in South Wales paying a visit to Jeff and Giles and their menagerie. The weather has been warm and nice all day, making the trip more enjoyable. The route down was fairly straight forward, no major traffic or route finding problems; I had my Nokia N810 and Maemo-Mapper telling me wnere to go.

Apart from paying Jeff a visit, our other reason for coming this far down was to collect The TV - one of the other YakYak forum members known simply as ‘Mr Dom’ had a 46″ rear projection telly that he didn’t want. It needs checking over by a TV repair man, having colour convergence problems, but is supposed to be OK otherwise. In need of a new telly I said I’d have it.

I drive a Fiat Panda, one of the newer ones. Not the biggest cars going. I now know my car’s boot space is exactly the same size as a 46″ rear projection telly. Using sokoban and Tetris skills, we got it to fit… just. My knees almost touch the dashboard. It’s like riding cattle class in a plane.

Jeff’s place is a nice colloection of old and new tech, sheep, llamas and other fluffy things. We’ve been introduced to the beasties and the perculiarities of his giant plasma telly.

Why am I getting so much spam on my main website? It’s unbelievable. Utter random gibberish, I though Akismet was good?

Off to bed, lots of things to do tomorrow.

Today was Year 10’s Alton Towers trip, a reward for being good kids all year. The bad ones got to stay at school and learn stuff (well, actually they just skived the day off, but the point was they didn’t come to Alton Towers and have fun). I went, along with all the other year 10 tutors. And most of year 10 - all 240 of them. It took five buses.

Now, fitting 240 normal people onto five busses and ensuring nobody got lost would be quite tricky. Try it with highly excited kids. Yeah. Oh, and our bus driver was a miserable git who kept chuntering and moaning. Supposedly the kids are thick because they like loud offensive music, and drop rubbish. Well duh, they’re kids, that’s why we bring binbags. We mostly ignored him.

I went on Oblivion, which was fun but waaay too short, and RipSaw which was hilarious. The designer of that ride did an awesome job, teasing the riders with the water jets; then actually spraying them by slowly lowering the carriage upside down into the jets and not turning the water off It also looks deceptively tame from the ground, but the whirling forces were fun and disorientating. It also lasted long enough for us to appreciate. Top stuff.

Getting all the kids into the busses again was fun. Two were still on a ride, making several of their friends really annoyed as they had a locker shared between them. All I knew was that on my bus there should be 47 kids, so after sitting them all down I had a count… 48. Hmm… let’s try again… SIT DOWN! NO! Give UP hitting each other, yes I’ll have a sweet thanks. 45… 46…47… that’ll be it right we have 47 kids (no idea if they’re the same 47 we started with, but they’ll do). Driver let’s go.

Like a military operation it was… slick. Yeah. But everyone arrived home and we didn’t take kids from anyone else’s school so the day was a success

Next year we get to go with them again for the year 11 trip Next time I’ll buy a queue jumper pass to avoid queuing for an hour for a 30 second ride.